Objective:

The overarching goal of this research is to create a useful, modular local cyberinfrastructure (CI) that will help small laboratories to: (1) curate and share their data efficiently while adhering to nationally recognized standards, (2) compare their data with data collected by larger research networks, and (3) scale their data from local to regional and global scales. The overarching research questions addressed by this study are: (1) What are the best practices for researchers at small laboratories who wish to organize their work such that they meet their own research goals while making their data discoverable and usable for data synthesis efforts? (2) What kinds of CI and best practices will connect researchers at small laboratories to broader scale data curation and analysis efforts? (3) What kinds of CI will best combine distributed data at multiple spatial scales?

Approach:

This study will first do a literature search and
interviews of small laboratories that collect
environmental, and specifically carbon cycling
data to determine how they currently organize
their work and information. Following an IRBapproved
protocol, interviews and focus group
sessions will be conducted at national meetings
such as the Ecological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union. Next, the study will
work with members of the Cyber-ShARE team to
design, build, implement, validate and verify the
new CI framework. The first phase of this project
will be to set up a prototype to curate and analyze
data collected by the Systems Ecology Laboratory
(SEL) at a research site at the Jornada Experimental
Range, within the northern range of the
Chihuahuan Desert. The second phase will bring
external data in for integration with local data
and will set up protocols for distributing data and
documentation to other data centers or projects.
The third and final phase of this project is to
promote use of the CI framework and modules
outside of the Jornada research group, and obtain
feedback on its usability and usefulness.

Expected Results:

Research in the new fields of ecoinformatics
and environmental applications is essential for
answering urgent, applied earth system questions.
The expected outcome of the research is
a validated, flexible CI framework that can be
used, modified and shared by small laboratories
to facilitate knowledge and data sharing, and that
can evolve over time with users’ evolving needs.
Such a CI will allow for bottom-up modifications
while keeping national frameworks and goals of
data management in focus. The CI framework and
modules developed for this project, posted online
as a free and dynamic resource, may encourage
laboratories to set up their own robust CIs and improve data sharing. Researchers in both the
environmental and computer sciences will be
encouraged to modify existing or create new
modules, keeping national initiatives in mind,
to address other lines of ecosystem or earth
system research. This could include curating and
discovering air and water quality, human health
and agricultural data, providing a platform for
synthetic studies of human-environment interactions.
Eventually, such data-supported activities
could inform efforts by EPA regarding the Clean
Air and Clean Water Acts. This set of bottom-up
activities meeting top-down environmental information
management efforts may help transform
ecological information management and sharing.

Potential to Further Environmental/Human Health Protection

The testing of this CI during each phase of development
will not only tell us about the efficacy
of the new CI, but also about regional environmental
processes, which ultimately have implications
to the burgeoning population in the desert
southwest. Being able to describe carbon cycling
at a regional level by quickly analyzing datasets
collected locally and comparing them to datasets
from different sites within the region can promote
rapid assessment of ecosystem health and productivity.
Being able to share data regionally will
promote collaborations, which will be able to
more quickly assess patterns in the data.

Supplemental Keywords:

ecology, informatics, cyberinfrastructure, environmental science

Progress and Final Reports:

The perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.